


it would not stop for me

by 24601lesbians



Series: because i could not stop for sand [2]
Category: Cobra Starship, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Addiction, F/M, Gen, Human Experimentation, M/M, Multi, Muteness, Torture, nonbinary andy hurley
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:45:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7359949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/24601lesbians/pseuds/24601lesbians
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>backstories.<br/>(if "because I could not stop for sand" is the main hoe, this is the side hoe)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. party poison

He couldn't get to that "better" buzz; there was just some part of his body that rejected the fuck out of the recommended doses, and looking back now he thinks that that should have been his sign.

Instead, it took a body dragged through the street his tiny (civilian grade, austere to the last unused shelf in the back room) two-room was built on. Pills forgotten, staring out the hand-sized window at a man trying to claw across the white cobblestones because his leg was splintered badly enough for Gerard to see his bones poking out. The combination of chemicals wasn't enough to properly oppose the shapes of fearsome thoughts that were coming into focus. The system’s favorite words—"Everything is Perfect"—had something to combat in Gerard’s mind now, and when he let the itch in his limbs take him down to one of the districts where there was more of everything, he decided to get someone more appropriate to take charge of weaning him off.

And oh god, the fucking detox, the way everything flashed at him like his first nightmare: some kind of mirrored cave packed with hands shoving things at him. Waiting out his own system was astronomically loud and filled with hot and cold flashes for months afterward. Stomach contents crashing again and again until they left him completely. People shouldn’t have such clear memories of what stomach acid tastes like. He remembers how feeble he was when he stood after hours curled in shitty blankets after dry-heaving.

 

The shirt and pants he's in are just as dull as they were the day he got them, but there are a few fibers of something on them, something red. When he looks to his shoes, the black of the heel is light with dirt and concrete dust. It’s reassuring. He walks out of the rust-walled hut inside one of the collapsed old buildings.

Between pickpocketing and starving, he decides to learn fast and get his fingers hooked into people’s tradeables. The shadows allow the first attempt to be labeled a success. The can of food just comes right out of the bag and his victim doesn’t even notice the weight difference because Gerard is _way_ in her face. She slowed a couple of strides when he walked up (first mistake), which nearly gave him enough time to question himself before pressing his forehead to hers. The second try was more for experimental purposes; he spends that night with a full stomach and a black eye. Balance.

He devotes the next day to getting his bearings and practicing different techniques on buzzers to avoid the lucky face-damaging kind of prey. The problem with this, he discovers and kicks himself for, is that buzzers usually don’t have any spare tradeables. Their doses are expensive. He makes his way into the blocks skirting the Inner City, trying to hound an official distributing cans of food to employees’ homes, more interested when he finds the man doesn’t have a weapon. They’re so fuckin’ confident in their wall that he’s disgusted.

When he worms back out again, he gives one last shot before calling it a day and making his way to somewhere with decaying plastic crates that looked better. There are two dracs around the corner; he knows they must have heard how erratic his footsteps were. Normal people don't pause, speed up, slow down unless there is speech directed at them first or they’re forced. One drac approaches him and he throws a fist into its throat, then drops into a slight crouch to swing his elbow into the other one. He runs, but thinks through different routes and outs as he goes. He _knows_ he's not much of a runner. Gerard prefers having a wall at his back.

He swerves into a close little alley, stops briefly to check the other side for signs of BLI bodies, and shoots out across the street and down another. Here, he waits. This space is a corner made by an ugly, squat building and a taller one that juts out. The first drac that approaches keeps walking past the edge of his area, but he doesn't look at it because the second one has reached him and has a hand on the slick-looking ray gun. Gerard rams it with a shoulder and grabs the zap by the barrel, bashing its knees before propping it against the brick wall and stomping on it.

The smoke of a cigarette— _how in the_ fuck _has anyone found any in months_ —floats past him. Three or four junkers walk up into his space and he leaves as if he’s got some kind of purposeful shit to get done _right now_. The second smallest one had a white drac coat on, which tends to be a bad sign. He keeps moving for most of the evening and not much changes, but in the later hours of the night he feels something prowling to either side of him, sees flashes in the puddles between the small piles of broken things that line the concrete’s edges periodically. Something tells him that he won’t be able to redirect their focus to anything except himself. Anticipation puts tremors in his breath. He might be well and truly fucked this time.

The first one makes a break at him, but slides a little on loose pavement and he takes off because a first escape was from the city’s shadows but a second out is just unlikely. The second he thinks it, arms bigger than his are enclosing him. The wild gestures and snapping and the set of his face are doing absolutely nothing for him. The shorter one pushes to him with a corkscrewed piece of metal. The body behind him pushes him to his knees for the other one to sink a knee into his gut and jerk his head back.

The metal drags across his neck, one, two, three passes.

“You fucking owe us, honey.”

Four passes. His collar is wet with blood, not sweat. Ripping himself away from the taller one’s hold will jam more of his throat into the shining strip just beneath the lump he finds in his throat.

“When they find you tomorrow morning, they'll take you out or take you in.” Short flashes a manic smile at him. This is not how he wants to die.

 

He’s at least four feet off the ground. This is not fixable. Take inventory, get somewhere a little more black than white. Gerard has no idea where he is and he doesn’t feel anything like hungover. Nothing hurts, other than the “I got my ass handed to me” way his back sort of hates him. A tray waits off to his left, resting on the clipboard built into the table.

There is a sole pill sitting in the tray. As expected, it’s white. It doesn’t look like what he’s newly come to refer to as a dizzymaker, and it’s too flat to be the type of forgetter-eraser that Outer City residents in his block were ingesting.

He attributes the slight prickle of hairs on his neck to the chill of the steel constraining him.

“Isn’t it perfect?”

His head jerks to the side to find a woman in a coat beaming at him. He can’t swallow. This is not quiet unease in his system, he is disturbed by the _wrongness_ that enters the room at her heels.

“I’m a specialist,” she says proudly and then promptly offers the pill to him.

 _Never accept an unknown, whether it’s an item or the person offering it._ He pretends not to hear and continues staring ahead. She doesn’t use the nose clamp or any gloves; the specialist simply washes her hands, snatches up the pill in one hand and closes her other hand’s fingers on his nose.

She pushes the pill into his mouth and unceremoniously dumps water down after it. She’s still plugging his nose and he has to swallow because there are specks of something behind his eyes from holding his breath against this. Halfway through the following coughing fit, he gets a plummeting feeling that he can’t make sense of until his head starts feeling like it’s going to burst.

She briskly slaps a monitor onto his chest.

“What a specimen,” she breathes.

Some kind of burn curls from his stomach to his extremities.

A stopwatch dangles from one wrist, a pencil sits in her free hand.

When she notices him choking on his own puke, she rolls her eyes and kicks a foot pedal to rotate him enough to let him let go. After the initial retching, it dribbles weakly off the side of his mouth and into his hair. The rigid plastic of the table stinks with it.

The pain in his hands is deafening. He has no distraction in here.

 

“We always push just as hard on the second day!” The specialist reminds him. He doesn’t understand exercising like this after vomiting twice with nothing in his stomach.

He can see the red against the towel like petite drops of blood dotting the sky. He’s uncertain about whether or not she’s using more force than necessary, but his face has been occupied by screaming so long that when his mouth is closed like this, it feels like he hasn’t actually moved at all. This is the last part. This hurts as much as the fucking blades. The cap on the antiseptic solution snaps shut and he instinctively tries so hard to move _away_ that he refocuses.

 

The next days hang starkly in his mind; nothing sticks out of the routine until some time later.

“Can you feel this?” She asks as she digs something explosively sharp beneath three of his fingernails. To help himself stay detached, he wonders why they waste time fixing him before they do shit like this.

“How does this feel?”

“You want another answer, ask another guy,” Gerard says hoarsely. His mouth and neck are usually numb by now, but today it’s fucking roaring when his breath makes contact with his throat. He’s not sure how long he’s been in here anymore, to have established a “usually.”

He hates it when they start with his hands. He can’t tell if it hurts more when they cover his eyes or not. The ceiling doesn’t provide much to him except lights that blind him anyway.

Slowly, he feels the sharpness pervade his arms and chest after the jabbing and slicing noises carry on for an unintelligible length of time. He has a chance to consider (somewhat dimly) whether covering his ears would help anything.

_Cue domino effect._

_Cue an ache deep inside his chest. Not a knife._

_Cue resolve._

_Cue something out of a dream, too soft and green to be metal raining down to his head._

_Cue something dark and rich on every piece that_ _smells softer than plain city dirt._

When he can draw himself together to open his eyes, Gerard is still bleeding sluggishly, but alone again. The same announcement starts as copper wafts to him from the floor.

“Letting us fix you allows both you and the Industry to live better. You are so close to perfect.”

Blearily, he begins to chew out whomever the voice is coming from before he realizes there isn’t one coming from him. He’s shocked awake now, the last traces of sleep dropping from his face. There’s no one around.

He doesn’t want to hear the vulgar sound of his blood leaking to the floor in the too-silent room.

The next time he is awake, it’s seconds after he’s fallen into a light sleep. Because the specialist has placed a hand on his shoulder and clamped it tightly enough to force his eyes open. “Today you will be transferred,” she says, and squeezes lightly.

He doesn’t want to move, but she makes him turn his head to look away from her while she extends his arm into a restraint on a slider pulled up next to the one he’s on. Once he’s all switched over on the right, she extends the left half (not far enough—it’s more uncomfortable than the one he’s on) and attaches his ankle first, then knee and wrist.

He can’t tell her to fuck off today. He won’t be able to tell anyone anything. It still has him more or less shocked, even after every test they’ve put him through throwing him into the mindset that he can’t roll downhill if he’s starting at the bottom. She only pushes his table part of the way out before she hands him off to someone else. The glass doors part smoothly.

It’s too dark to count as dusk, but still a few shades light of night. The outside air is heavy on his skin after how dry his cold, silver room was. The metal looping his wrists to each other isn’t warming up. He is accompanied to the car, which showed early, by the specialist’s younger lackey (He assumes a botched schedule by the specialist’s absence).

The driver steps out, pulls the man aside to speak a moment, then comes and opens the door for Gerard once the man is gone.

Gerard eyes the restraints that wait for him on the seat and on the floor.

“No need.”

He drops into the seat, staying as compact as he can manage. After ten minutes of staring out the window at buildings they roll past, they stop, pulling up next to the gate out and showing a pass to the faceless booth reader. “Disposal,” the driver says flatly. The box garbles a return phrase. A decent distance from the outside of the pentagonal wall, he hits the brakes unexpectedly, still blocks from one of the incinerators that BLI gives all waste to. Gerard watches him press a button and there’s a _thunk_ from the doors that makes him jump. “Stay in the Lower City.” He nods to the door, but still refuses to look at his passenger.

The new man allows him time to use the car door to guide himself to a niche between the closest dumpbox and a wall. His bones are protesting every movement of his diaphragm, let alone attempts to support weight. He has to drag himself for more than ten of the fifteen feet.

“Suicide is robbing them, but you got to sit in the same car as my future murderer.” He smiles distantly at the windshield, not flat enough to signify someone going very steady with Industry higher-ups or Industry chemicals. “I hope they heard that.”

Gerard sees him bark a short laugh, take off down another street, and can hear the crash when that white car rams the wall between the Lower districts and Outer City.

 

The Lower City is good for him. Concrete slabs garnished with pieces of pill bottles and the occasional mark of blood still attract a little more sun down there.

He has no guardrails until the girl. She’s a bony thing, growing inch by inch until she overtakes him within a year after they meet. When he wakes up to find her dozing against the white bricks, the uncomfortable feeling of muscles splitting has been haunting every movement Gerard’s made for the first six days. He doesn't mean to wake her up with his silent cries, doesn't know how the hell she's not gone yet. He isn't leaving though; he was here first. He wonders if his bloodshot eyes are putting other shrugs off of their spot.

She starts to swing her bag onto her shoulder when she notices he’s actually awake, but he waves her off. _No problem._ The way she carries herself more confidently than anyone he’s ever seen convinces him that she has no remains of a pill in her body more than the way her eyes flit to everything around that moves. Probably clean for months, maybe years. She settles back on the bag with one eye open. Holds up a hand. “If I don’t know your name, I can’t sell you out.”

He shrugs. Easier for him. It’s not like he could sell her out if he wanted to. She studies his face; he studies his shoes.

Over time, he finds that the scars on his chest fade faster than those on his arms, and his hands encounter enough wear and tear to turn the white marks invisible.


	2. fun ghoul

Ghoul sees him with a packed-out hauler—canvas, green, ratty but in a way that still holds a change of warmer clothes and some cans—and two cardboard boxes. Studies his height, his face while he’s stopped at the end of the street, eyes probably scanning for a dumpbox.

Cautiously, he asks whether the redhead wants his help. He nods, but leans over to set the box down so he can unzip his jacket. He glances up to make sure Ghoul is watching, then salutes him with the first knife he pulls out. “Got it?” Ghoul nods.

“I won’t pull anything. But if I impress you, can I have a pair of gloves?”

He looks dubious, but gives the high sign. They pass a couple clusters of shrugs before Ghoul climbs into a beaten-up doorway.

 

Ghoul rides out the next night with his new-enough gloves making him a little bolder when he gets close to the inner wall. Covering the majority of the tattoos on his hands gives him the chance to be closer to undesired lines of sight. Once he decides he’s going to try keeping them clean, the back of his hand briefly smacks the back of the newly-painted side of the building beside him. A little aggravation flares inside him before he looks again and decides he likes the pattern that follows the shapes of his knuckles. He slaps the second glove against the wall for the hell of it.

They’re dry by the time he pops back under the painted-brick street to see if the more or less indifferent guy from yesterday is still around. He waits until the sun reappears (he doesn’t see it above the smog, he just knows it’s there) before he goes back, because he seemed worn thin enough yesterday when Ghoul gave him an apparently blinding headache from all the routes and back ways through the tunnels. He calls out a couple of times; mostly it’s mid-volume and limited to “OI” and “where the fuck are you?” until he sees him sorting through his bag in the exact spot Ghoul left him in.

“Hey there, um.”

“Bad Bet,” he supplies.

Some of the tied-off rags he’s taken out to set in front of his knees have batteries, some have charges—he recognizes the shape sticking out of one side—and the second-smallest one has a couple different gauges of wire coiled up.

“Okay. I’ll be heading down a little farther. Yell if you need something.”

He drags his hands on the wall as he walks until he finds an offshoot of the tunnel, ambling along until he’s in one of the dead ends in the hopes of scoring anything. The wear pattern on the floor isn’t making sense. It’s probably from someone who was around when the levels were poured over, sealed off so the city could be built above them. Because if Better Living glosses over it, it’ll fucking go away. He snorts to himself, tries to put another perspective to the space. That’s when he finds a little crack, difficult to make out, but possible. A foot and a half or so up the wall, some paint is stripped off. The deepest run in the floor doesn’t match up to the crack evenly, so that’s where he digs his fingertips in to lift the section away. After he swings down into the colder air, he walks up to a crumbling window ledge a few steps in— _what kind of pretentious asshole puts windows underground?_ —and leans his elbows on it. The air here isn't fresh, but at least it's cleaner. Ghoul flicks his lighter and starts moving.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes when he finds one of the old, old vending machines. They haven’t been like this since he was a kid. It’s still dusty white, probably has innards working dutifully in perfect condition. He pulls his sleeve down over his hand and knuckles one of the buttons. Nothing. Next one. Nothing. In front of the zap button, he hits it fast in case somehow there’s one left in the machine. Nothing. The last panel gives him a couple of batteries; the juice in them is probably beyond fucking old, but he figures that if he goes to trade them off, he’ll undoubtedly find a sap that doesn’t know the difference off the bat.

He’s even more glad he didn’t jump to thinking there wasn’t anything worth being curious about down here on the almost-lowest level he’s found yet when he finds a very old hand crank radio. It’s black, it’s small enough to drop into a pocket if he needs to, and he loves it the second he lays eyes on it. When he follows the rough floor punctuated by cracks, the next wall is a web of metal tracks (probably for shelves) and broken-off wires. The screws and dials on the bigger speakers that are now visible sit worn and lifeless. There was a splitter a couple of feet from the first one, but he’d have to get his hands on some kind of air compressor to get the dust and god knows what else out of the output side. As he reaches down to carefully pry it from the wall, a gust of stench hits him. Mouse shit is caked into the crevices spanning the backs of the plastic shells. Ghoul fumbles with the wiring anyway, taking time to note every one that’s been chewed out. He’ll be coming back.

 

By the time he ups his pace for the walk back, his spare bag is fat with little plastic men with long guns, and a ridiculously brightly colored book, which has few pages, but everything is in color including the words at the bottom. Ghoul is still amazed that this exists, and had pulled his things out of his bag to layer it in so it wouldn’t get damaged. There were some insects, too, dead and living black-and-yellow things in a chunk of something papery that he didn’t want to go near.

He ends his self-guided tour in the same room he started in, only a few away  from where Bad Bet was. Ghoul sleeps through the morning and into the afternoon, but is awake by the time Bet comes back. He shows up beside him with cans of spray paint behind his back.

"If I were jumpier, you'd be bleeding out now," he says grimly, but it doesn’t really faze Ghoul because he just got Bet to jump about three feet just from popping up out of nowhere. And Bet was awake.

“I found paint,” he explains airily, offering the heavier can. “Don’t spend it all in one place.” 

 

There are already some marks on the cinderblock wall that have somehow been overlooked, maybe because they’re faded with age. Bet reads them to himself, but Ghoul can hear him.

“Suffer/Rise” is the pale blue, and the greenish-white one under their feet says “THIS” in bold letters. He guesses that the other words to it have been lost to footsteps.

Bet leaves behind volcanoes littered in random patterns, but Ghoul’s mind is taking shape under his equally busy hand. Circles are forming. _This is you_ , he thinks. _Go up_. He paints an arrow running from the circle to the indistinct shapes of clouds in the evening sky.

 

“I don’t know if you’re staying here, but I’ll be staying underfoot, I think.”

“I’ll manage, thank you. I’ve done it before.”

“Yeah, so you haven’t always had a hand, so—“

“And look at me now, I made it anyway,” he retorts.

He’ll wear Bet down from eight kinds of unpleasant to at least seven.

Idly, he thinks about the word _weak_ as he walks back to where he slept. Sleeps. He spends a few steps on it, but the only thing that his brain wants to pair with _weak_ is _alone_.

 

Of the two of them, Ghoul is the “sleep in the day” type. It works out pretty well as far as adjusting to have someone watching his back and sleeping in more careless places. Bet gives him a heads up when he leaves and a pile of shit to fix so he can trade it off, Ghoul keeps an eye on their territory for a while, then appreciates the fact that he’s found a place where he’s able to be dead to the world. And even though Bet comes back for sleep at the time Ghoul is still pushing his fingers through his hair and stretching, he’s still got enough energy to scold him and make little one-liners. Bet keeps his room full of random shit to trade off, but it’s still pretty much immaculate. As far as an ultra-comfortable lifestyle can get inside the city walls, this is probably the best he could be scraping out of any district.

He usually starts twisting the handle of his radio after he’s eaten (sometimes as he eats, but only when it’s a really fucking old, stale can that won’t drip anything on his baby). Bet adores it. He’ll hold nothing back when deciding to turn the volume up, rumors of sewer dracs be damned, saying it helps him sleep. Ghoul only reaches out to turn it down after he disappears into his room, and even then there’s still usually a shout of “Live a little!” that resonates down every dead end that begins in the next twenty feet.

Bet comes back on the border of sundown and nighttime haze once after a few weeks. Quietly, Ghoul thinks he’s exhausted, and doesn’t try to push food at him before he curls up on the floor with a blanket Ghoul found the day before. The second time Doctor Death-Defying drops his voice onto the waves between songs, he picks out “got a little south-sliding gamble” and “lost it in Battery City.”

It’s kind of a big deal when the Doc recognizes somebody specific, so he shakes Bet awake in time for him to hear, “I’ll only say it once more: there’s a little question some smoke blew to me about taking up in the glass house a stone’s throw away for a couple of days. Send me more than static if you’re putting sluggishness second.”

It has Bet awake immediately, rooting through the hauler Ghoul first saw him with until he comes to a wad of cloth wrapped around a box. He jerks his head to the door, and Ghoul takes the cue and leaves.

When he comes out to where Ghoul’s been sitting, he plops on the floor, too. “So we’re going to be bunking somebody up for a handful of days.”

“Does he know the way?”

“We’re meeting him in two days, but I think tomorrow we should look over the spot, get the lay of things.”

 

They make it as far as the edge of the building they’re meeting the man they’ll play landlords for when they notice that somebody’s at the end of the block, not sitting on the curb, but lying tucked against it. It looks out of place and they both hesitate. Shrugs don’t run or sleep on vixen-controlled streets at this hour. And they don’t stop moving even if they are. If Bet and Ghoul try to wheel it to get out, it’ll be more than just a “fuck you” to the curfew. They duck down the nearest side street and see a guy in the middle of the street with his head in his hands, foot nudging a bottle over the surface now and then. It echoes off the buildings’ fronts and he’s going to get them fucking caught.

The way he’s thrashing around makes him seem like he’s bigger than either of them, but he’s their size and Ghoul honestly wants to know how the hell he does it. They all struggle for a while before Bet and Ghoul get him flipped on his back. They don’t get much of a chance to do more than pick him as city from the dark hair and eyes before he’s talking.

“Guess this is just what life does to you after years of hopelessness,” he slurs, and throws his arms wide. “Better zone punks than these ignorant pigs. Shoot me.” His eyes are desperate and he’s holding himself still.

“So that’s it? Are you just waiting to die?” Ghoul can hear the turbulence in Bet’s voice.

“I’m another speck on the surface. I’ve never _known_ the real fear, I want to just leave these people.”

“Be a fucking person,” Bet growls. “Because that does more than asking for a charge to the head. There’s more than you. You had to have already know that there were rats out here, because you went fucking looking for some way to die when you have some more of those crisp black ties at home that would have done fine, asshole.”

“I wanted to see more than my bathroom,” he retorts, _see_ and _more_ running together. He squints at his hands while the wind runs through his (longer than regulation—he’s pushing limits) hair.

“You two stink of freedom. What I would give, just to breathe different air.”

“If it’s so shitty, why aren’t you buried in the pills? Half of the reason they work is because people want them to work.” His face is softer, but he says it coolly.

“That’s funny, because the pills don’t help. Fuckin’ vile.”

Ghoul can see him fading into focus a little better now, and considers the questioning look Bet sends to him over the guy’s head. He weighs it all out. Helping someone reboot is one of the things that’s the same for all of them across the board; city or zone, skyrocketing or on-and-off, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the observer’s responsibility to feed them or clothe them, just to bat the pill bottles out of their hands. Expecting nothing in return. To him, they’re just poor unfortunate souls. Especially this case. They’re probably close to the same age, and he’s been off for what, four years? It was hard enough with that much dependency under his belt; he has issues picturing himself with even more. This is going to be shitty for him, but Ghoul is willing to try for the better result.

He undoes the guy’s tie so there won’t be vomit on it and picks him up with relative ease, making sure he can twist away if he starts throwing up. Which will probably be soon. He stumbles a little on the way back down because Bet tries to help when they’re on some stairs, and while Ghoul really does appreciate it, sudden weight distribution doesn’t go with concrete stairs. They both talk from time to time, but his shoulder muffles most of it.

 

“Leaving in ten.”

“Why does it sound like this is a Bet-only deal? He can find a bucket.”

“Because you’re staying here and keeping him breathing.”

“The fuck I am.”

“We went through the trouble of getting him here,” Bet points out. And Ghoul grudgingly agrees. “And before I get Smoker down here, I have to keep scavenging shit because that’s what I do.”

He sighs and lets Bet walk away, scuffs his shoes on the ground, and waits for withdrawal to make itself known in the next couple of hours.

Before too long, he finds himself letting the guy slump against the wall and breathe for a minute while he looks for a second bucket—he might not _need_ it, but it’s just in case. Ghoul guides him back to the bucket and winces. He can’t remember if he looked this bad when he was just a host, not a body, for the mixtures packed into little unmarked tablets.

After his fifth round with the bucket and an empty stomach, he stares at the wall, looking catatonic before that switches to his _I’ll throw up any second_ expression. Ghoul shoves the bucket back between his knees just in time. He has none of the unhealthy temptation to look anymore, and even though taking one of the buckets down a couple of levels to the sewers means the room this guy’s in will smell decent eventually, it means he actually has to experience the sewers first. And this time, he’s taking the bucket down after three rounds of sick instead of five. He’s not fucking spilling that on himself again.

For the first time today, he talks. “Everything I want, you have, or it's in your reach.”

“I mean, if you don’t want the bucket,” Ghoul starts jokingly. The guy pales anyway. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding, don’t aim for me.” He honestly doesn’t know how it’s possible that this is still materializing when he _knows_ they haven’t risked feeding him in the time he’s been in their part of the tunnels.

“Do you want me to clean that later?”

“I’ve already gotten some on myself and at this point I don’t care. You’re doing some hard work right now.”

“It was the drinking, when I was in the road,” he says. It falls flat, and he drums his fingers on his legs for a minute or so. “Asking for that, that part was almost inevitable. But being born like that, being born not with little to nothing, but everything, I thought I would never have a shot at experiences that you, people like you, have," he says helplessly. “I was nothing to the world. An abomination, maybe. But nothing noteworthy.”

Ghoul grinds his teeth while he searches for an appropriate reply. “That’s healthy, though. If they think it’s bad for you, some part of it has to be worthwhile. Like, if you don’t do something with that fact, what purpose do you have?”

 

Ghoul props him up on his side so he won’t choke if he wakes up from a rebelling stomach (like he probably will), then takes a few turns to see if Bet’s back yet. He’s got a little anxiety about Smoker, Doc or no Doc. Not the crippling kind, just enough to hang around his periphery.

“I was about to come get you. How’s Roadkill?”

“Stomach’s having a tough time of it. Where’s Smoker?”

“I told him to set up in the space we chose.”

Smoker’s room is just past where the floor starts sloping downward, not too close or too far from dead ends or where Ghoul and Bet sleep. When they arrive in his doorway, he sees that Tiffany Smoker’s shoulders are held high, but not the proud kind of high. His hair is just short of Ghoul’s, and a little wilder. When he closes up his third bag, most of the floor is covered in piles of rags tied in the trader style (a different kind of knot than Bet’s, not as loose).

“I expected a bolthole,” Smoker says. “This is… you’ve got something here.”

When he goes down to check on the roadkill the next day, he isn’t there. He didn’t say anything about leaving, but Ghoul knows he just wanted off of their toes as badly as he wanted out of the Inner City. He didn’t really mind the guy—it was nice to hear jokes and quips that were a little less acidic than Bet’s were before Smoker showed his face. It’s been one day, Bet’s probably seen him for under two hours total since they’ve met, and he’s different. Maybe it’s combining with Ghoul trying to wear him down too. With Roadkill out of the tunnels, he has to go back to the piles of things Bet left for him to fix up, but he also wants company.

“You mind if I stay in here for a bit?"

“It’ll waste less light. Go ahead.”

Ghoul sets the couple of vend-a-hacks and com boosters down across from Smoker’s side of the crate-and-board table with his screwdrivers; he starts tinkering with the boosters first. The amplifiers in the second one are being difficult to doctor.

“Nice ink,” he eventually comments.

“When the WKIL crew commissions a batch of poppers, the Doc’ll manhandle enough chips and charges to leave me sitting pretty for a while, and I tend to drop a little too much on my art.”

“I had to pay in food for half of these, but it wasn’t all up front. Had to eat with the artists for a while.” Splitting cans with them was rough when they were bigger than he was (all of them were) and they were hungrier than he could afford. 

When he takes the radio down with him after a break, Smoker seems to recognize some songs, stopping to tap out rhythms familiar in his wrists and ankles. When his own water jug is almost empty, he figures it’s time to ask after Smoker’s. 

"Smoker, d’you need more water?” He sees his mouth fall into a tense line with the pause in his hands. “Do I tack the ‘Tiffany’ back on there?”

Smoker arches an eyebrow at this. “Never had the offer before I said anything. But yeah, I like having both because I feel like both. Kind of like how Show Pony is about that.”

 _Ohhhh_. “Okay.”

“And a refill would be great.” 

 

Ghoul has one Tiffany Smoker thawed completely within the week (he thinks it’s kind of funny, the way Bet shoots him borderline murderous looks he thinks Tiffany Smoker won’t see). They both keep their tools sorted and in easy reach, and all of the work that Ghoul’s seen is slow, meticulous. They sit on the same side of the table now, too, so when Tiffany Smoker curses and drops the wire cutters and Ghoul reaches for them, he can catch them before they hit the ground. Tiffany Smoker usually turns back to their notebook when Bet starts humming to himself after he scarfs his food in the mornings, snapshots of what he remembers from one of the transmissions the night before. He’ll sit in with them now and then, usually at the end of their working time and the beginning of his. Bet leaves right before Tiffany Smoker and Ghoul put their things up and sleep the day away. Their “few days” with Ghoul and Bet has really been stretched.

He'd built the assumption that Tiffany Smoker thought a lot of Bet on the way they tended to shrug and betray nothing, and nothing obviously means something. It lasts as a mere assumption until Tiffany Smoker says “Bet’s smarter than he thinks he is,” out of nowhere one day, nice as anything, and that does it. It never hurts to ask, when he’s out of range of Tiffany Smoker’s ass kicking skills and everything on the table is too fragile to throw. Ghoul watches their eyebrows shoot up, but their mouth stays lopsided. He knows it’ll be a half-assed answer before the words leave their mouth.

And because he underestimated the ass-kicking distance limit, he gets booted off the chair by Tiffany Smoker right before Bet’s in the doorway.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Chitchat with the roadkill." Bet scrubs a hand over his face. “He was at the tables in the quarter that cozies up to this block from the other district. He gave me a communicator, one of the new ones? They have really fucking good encryption. He said it’s for us, but I know you make the tunnels your business, so I can hang onto it. Pickpockets know not to show around my tables, witnesses or no.”

“It’s alright with me. I can only spell a few words anyway.” And that’s that. 

 

On and off, Roadkill will ask for stories of the desert from Bet, fights and trades and storms. Ghoul thinks that maybe he’s trying to get his sand legs, but he isn’t quite sure because as far as they can tell, Roadkill is back in his company’s intestines. It’s impossible to catch transmissions from Dr. D from the Inner City, though, so sometimes they just give him traffic updates. In return, he gives them condensed delivery schedules of trucks with machinery and chemical pellets and energy sources.

They find that the trucks tend to have nothing they need. Fan belts and cap molds don’t really call their names, and he doesn’t really need to ask Bet about how well modulators bigger than his torso will go over on trading tables. It takes some time, but they get notified of some shit they really, _really_ don’t need. It’s a load with the nitros that pour desperation into the citizens and the buzzers.

“Let’s get rid of it,” Bet suggests.

“Bet, Bet. Bet, let’s tell them.” Ghoul drags Bet into the workroom and turns to them the second he can see one of their arms. “Would you want to do bomb thing again?”

“What?”

He’s trying very hard to stay patient while Bet takes his time explaining until Tiffany Smoker says, “I can do it.” Of course they can do it. “Can I bring somebody in for a few days? He’s excellent with wiring and won’t really let me use his tools unless he’s there with them. ‘Lujah, another guy, will have to be in and out with him, but I’ve worked with both of them before. They’re both multitaskers. And I kind of owe them one.” At this, Bet looks to Ghoul, but it’s his call as much as Ghoul’s.

 

The next night, when he walks in a while before midnight after a break, a big guy in a green-black jacket is on some crates with both hands in the hole in the ceiling above him. He’s a lot taller than Ghoul and his hands have scars from factory steam.

“Why’re you here?”

“Tapping the electricity grid so I can load these up,” he says, large but nimble fingers twisting the wires while he nods to the ragbag on the workbench with a soldering iron sticking out. “And _he’s_ here because he has a knack for finding the extra shit I need that I didn’t want to take directly somewhere I don’t know, Tiffany Smoker or no Tiffany Smoker. This is Hallelujah Bang.”

Hallelujah Bang has a fro that’s darker and almost bigger than Jet’s, but he’s a little closer to a normal person’s height. Ghoul can tell by the way he doesn’t get a ridiculous ache in his neck from looking him in the eye.

“Jet Star forgot to introduce himself. He kind of has a thing for electricity like I have a thing for finding stuff.”

“That’s alright.” He’s still watching Jet’s hair.

“Would there by any chance be a standard you have when you drop into a bar?”

Somehow, Jet hears him. “Don’t jump him for input when we’ve been here for less than three days.”

When Ghoul goes out to buy Bang and Jet Star rebreathers in case the sewers flood like last year, he pulls two extra ones from the stall. Just in case some other open-eyed hungry kid is around without the extra charges to trade for one. And if he doesn’t find somebody to fit that bill, he supposes they could be a bribe later. He’ll remember them in a couple of years, at least. The second he gets back to the workroom Tiffany Smoker’s sharing with Jet and himself, Bet is already handing him the radio.

“Hey, Roadkill said you should turn the radio up for something important. Do the honors?”

His radio is always up, because it’s pretty much a rule when they’re down here and the sound will be buried under the city, but he ups it a click or two.

“And this morning we’ve got a pretty face who looped himself out here for hours until we stopped bumper to bumper, a real sound chaser. If there’s a crew of mine who’s short a man, call up to the van for the Sandman who’s been robbing himself blind BL-deep and fixing some shit.” They’re all glued to the radio now. “And whoever—Sand or Sun or tunnel runners—sent this dustbrained buck in his Inner City whites out to us, zap in hand, thanks for the charges and keep your boots tight ‘til tomorrow.”

Bet tugs the humming com from his pocket again a minute later: “’This van reeks of metal and leather and music. Bet, I am in love.’ Ghoul, Roadkill has said nothing until now since this time yesterday.” He looks up. “Holy shit—”

“He made it,” Ghoul finishes.

When Jet finally drags himself out of his bedroll halfway through Ghoul and Tiffany Smoker’s workday (Ghoul doesn’t get why he goes to bed at _noon_ ), he sets up on Smoker’s side of the table and starts fooling around with a pair of pliers and one of Tiffany Smoker’s bags of parts.

“Where’s ‘Lujah?”

Jet snorts. “Scouting.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working,” he answers vaguely.

“ _On_?" Ghoul prompts.

“If I try to explain it, you’ll make the confused face at me.”

“You don't have to be a smug little bastard all the time. Take a nap.”

Jet wastes a moment looking him up and down with an eyebrow cocked. “I’ll be a smug little bastard if I want. Besides,” he cracks a grin and turns back to the set of jars without missing a beat. “There’ll always be a littler bastard around.”

 

“He’s quite the steady hand,” Tiffany Smoker says when they leave the room to exercise and eat. Ghoul goes back in with them (and Bet right behind) and looks around to try gaining some idea of how this works. Something’s bubbling quietly under a metal hood. One of the bottles in the center sighs briefly. Jet measures and pours alongside Tiffany Smoker’s crate-chair, mindless in that “I could do this in pitch-black conditions with thick gloves on” way of his. He looks down again and Tiffany Smoker is hunched over a small stack of tools that all look the same to him, completely absorbed.

"Well, cross your fingers,"

"Fuck off."

“All I did was care.” Ghoul flings an arm out and fake-sobs.

Tiffany Smoker throws a thimble at his elbow and points to the door.

He hasn’t been seeing much of ‘Lujah, but if he was in line of sight, Ghoul could probably hear him thinking about finding a place for his own bar.

 

“It’s basically live,” Tiffany Smoker says when he comes back in later, the _don’t fuck around and waste the chance_ in their posture. “So don’t, like, jostle it much.”

He puts it in the cheap bag that Bet brought back. “’Lujah’s leading Jet out and then halfway down the block. I’ll be out and back as soon as I can.” Jet Star bumps Ghoul on the shoulder good-naturedly and follows ‘Lujah Bang out of the room. Ghoul sends a quick mental note to anything out there if there is anything, in fact, out there: if somebody fucks either collaborator up, make sure Ghoul knows where they are so he can fuck _them_ up. He takes a few turns away from them near the end, then takes a walk that lasts a while before he decides it’s time to resurface.

All of the people around the entrance disperse before five—every day, without fail. Which gives him clear timing and no witnesses unless there’s a four-man of dracs doing random checks in addition to all the cameras that he covered with black spray paint three minutes ago. All speed and no stealth, he abandons the bag where he is and moves down the block. Ghoul squats between a dumpbox and the wall it’s attached to, counts off the seconds in taps of his fingers against his kneecaps, almost silent. _Now_ , he mouths to himself.

The deep sound rolling out under the screaming objection of almost-cold metal makes him as content as seeing the remains of the truck’s cab clattering outward. The ringing in his ears isn’t too bad. _God, what a bomb_ , he thinks, straightening up.

He walks back into their territory soaked with stupid pride at having pulled it off.

 

The next day, when he decides that it’s time to take a break from the tunnels and the fixits that have been piling up on his bench, he also decides there’s too much space between what’s already been inked under his skin. Driving rain layered with wind that his coat is almost too thin for keeps him under for two days and he kind of knows he’s driving the others nuts. But he can’t help it.

The second the weather clears up, ‘Lujah throws in a “take me, too, while you're at it," and all of a sudden, he’s in the shady little three-walls-up corner, under the needle and staying put. Tiffany Smoker is exactly as lean as Ghoul expects when they’re out of their vest and red-dyed shirt, but they have way more patterns all over their torso than he saw coming. It’s kind of amazing, like the way Hallelujah Bang has his own colors, too. Under the buzz, he feels a sense of accomplishment every time he does this: makes sure no one can erase what’s been drawn on him.

They come back without incident, no more marks than they’d set out to get. ‘Lujah is describing the ideal bar yet again, and Bet doesn’t snap about it. Bet says “I’ll help you” like it hasn’t even occurred to him yet.

 

Jet squeezes out of the half-sized door and lets out a hiss of pain before he rips a clump of hair out of the hinge, leaving enough space in the side room for Ghoul and Bet to sit down while Jet, ‘Lujah, and Tiffany Smoker are back at it again with pipe wrenches and glue.

“Ghoul, how are you doing this? It was just you and me, like. Ten seconds ago. And now there are people tromping around everywhere and I’m lapping it up instead of shoving off.” There’s no heat behind it, not even resignation when he’s drenched in sludge because triple-checking the pipes was kind of super necessary.

“We don’t lose something by expanding our definition of ‘us’, okay?” Ghoul rests a hand on the cool concrete floor either side of his knees. It’s a solid contrast to the hot and murky air that surrounds them when they’re up close and personal with the pipe that won’t quit. ‘Lujah Bang chose an area with a three-story maze of tunnels placed around the real entrance (a tunnel in a dead end of the lowest level) that doesn’t connect to the living space, but the pipe beside the bar-to-be bursts and overflows periodically.

Hallelujah Bang smiles as stupidly at his bar, _his bar_ , as he did every time he just described it to the others before he had gotten his (and their) hands dirty. The “why not” attitude he puts off is catching. Ghoul convinces Bet to message Sandman about it—the idea, their progress, all of it.

The reply that comes through two days later sarcastically advises hopping on a sound system. Sandman knows they can’t afford one, hell, _he_ couldn’t even afford one if he offered up his charges and his clothes together. The next message Bet reads off to Ghoul is names, followed by Sandman explaining that they’re actually a desert crew that kind of adopted him. Ghoul is amazed that some kind of luck is always keeping him afloat, maybe all of them, if he’s honest.

So, once they make more progress and shoot words through the air with Sandman, he shows up with a brightly colored, sparky set of motherfuckers, and Ghoul gets to leave and meet the guests this time. Sandman is in the front, but off to the side. Fool Cobra, he assumes, is the ultravibrant one in the center of the pack. Either no one told them that people aren’t so conspicuous in the city, or they didn’t care enough to trade off.

Following the briefest of brief introductions in the tunnels—Diamond Shades and Mess Maker are too absorbed in each other to do anything but wave briefly with a hand that the other tugs at again as soon as it’s over. Ghoul also still has never seen less than one sizing everything up at any given time. So far Mess Maker is more amusing when he does it, flopping his longer hair around—and a descent to the actual space, Future Cry is the one that either keeps his little finger wrapped around Fool’s or has a whole hand in one of his pockets. He notices Fool scanning the walls beside him as if they were about to explode. “You don’t like it down here, do you?” Maybe he says it to Fool, but he kind of means all of them.

Fool shrugs, but doesn’t stop. “I’ll get used to it, especially for the rate you’re promising.”

“Uh.” He looks behind Fool’s shoulder at Sandman, who mimes shooting.  “Yeah.” Of course he’s paying them off in fucking charges. He’s swimming in them. _Happy accidents, I guess_.

“And those two are missing their last link due to some broken bones, so once she’s here, we’ll have better balance.”

Sandman takes the crew and starts talking with his arms, but when Ghoul peels off the pack to the workroom, Fool Cobra approaches him, gesturing to Ghoul’s radio with his communicator. “Signal’s best here?” he asks apologetically, pulling out a metal box and resting his com on it. The booster is outfitted with something metallic (and pointless) that’s gone blotchy with age, bigger and more crude than any that have left Ghoul’s hands since he was in his early teens. They exchange a nod.

“Disaster Sass,” he says, unflinching as the speaker turns out a very steady female voice who is loud enough for Ghoul to hear. He doesn’t try to break her flow, just moves this booster and com away from his ear. Eventually, the first thing he says after it is the last thing he says. “You can have your boys back soon once you’re here for the gigs. Get your foot out of my ass before it gets broken in a third place,” Fool says before he hangs up and saunters off.

 

Since it shows up in Ghoul’s head when they’re both escaping Sandman and his crew at the workbench, Tiffany Smoker is the first to hear the idea that they could at least buy speakers and cables if they plan a raid on a factory, then a slow run of sales with the rest of Bet’s things. A double draw.

“If we start saving now, we’ll be able to pay for a good system when we’re dead, yeah? Somewhere out there, there’s at least one person holding. And Bet’s been saying that antibugs and stretch wrap have been rare finds on the tables.”

“No one’s cracked enough to go with you.”

Ghoul shoots them a pleading look. “Bet is.”

And Tiffany Smoker ends up in the spare room when Fool’s saying, “Sandman’s given us all rounds of the factories, and I know you’ll need to make it past a couple of windows, so blend.”

Tiffany Smoker looks down at their arms, then looks back up at Fool. When Ghoul makes the _this dipshit’s serious?_ face at them, they shrug with one shoulder. Sweetly, Bet smiles at Fool. “Remind us of the uniform in this factory?” Only a detail. A glaring detail.

Fool rolls his eyes. “I just fuckin’ told you. It’s a short-sleeved… aw, _fuck_. You concrete-climbing types gotta do everything the hard way. I’m taking at least ten charges for this, Sandman, goddamn.”

“I was going to give you nine,” Sandman confesses.

 

“You didn’t have to come with me,” he hears Bet mumble to Tiffany Smoker. When Ghoul turns around, he’s fussing over Bet’s collar. Unbelievable. On the street that’ll curve up alongside the entrance, he opens his mouth. “What happened to the finesse of a one-man team,” he complains. “Did you ever listen when people said two intruders are easier to catch than one?”

“That’s why we have three. Shut up.”

"Are you ready?"

Tiffany Smoker smiles and sends a shot through the lock on the door. "Set, go."

Ghoul breathes deep while he weaves through the factory a step behind them, crossing paths with nothing but the windows revealing lines of steam turbines getting smaller and smaller with every flight of stairs. They’re not interested in the underground portion of the factory; he’s all too aware that if they fuck this up, they’re permanent on the pavement — because jumping the windowsill is a better choice than going into the research buildings.

They stop when Bet says stop, then start jamming everything into the light, roomy backpacks that have been waiting in Bet’s stockpile. Soon enough, the needles, wrap bandages, burn creams, contacts, gloves, _everything_ is off the med bay shelves. “It’ll sell like puddles to rain.”

All of it’s gone, and that means it’s time to go back to dealing with the fucking heights.

He’s reluctant, but takes to the rooftops. It feels unnatural to be up high like this. He pictures himself careening and swallows. All he has to do is climb down. Bet is trying to reassure him, but he can’t really hear it because of the roaring in his ears. There’s nothing clipped onto his vest to slow him down if the wall isn’t shitty enough for good handholds to show themselves. He tips himself over the side and inches down.

He stops on the ground to catch his breath but a second later, a knee collides with his face, and the blood from his forehead forces him to grope until he finds a gap in the wall to haul himself onto his feet. When he keels over after that, he recognizes the tattooed, precise hands that drag him off the ground as Tiffany Smoker’s. They all allow a minute to regroup; in Ghoul’s case, steel some nerves, because he’s taking point now.

He does his best to melt into the shadows again, stick out in front of the others so they don’t have to deal with anything too stressful and life-threatening. It’s a pretty solid plan until they’re halfway to their destination and he swings around a corner that was empty before they hit the factory up.

There are three—and _only_ three, he checks twice before the familiar footsteps of the others stop behind him. The middle one has a zap pointed at his chest. If he pulls the trigger, Ghoul knows a knife from Bet will be sticking out of his. Stalemate. The boy’s frozen arm is the barrier between life and death. The other two with him stay in their corner, watching warily.

No one’s going to move until he breaks this. Ready to ignore his instincts again, he makes a shooing motion behind his back with one hand and a gun with the other.

 _Thank fuck zap shots don’t ricochet_ , he thinks, and dives for his ankles.

Ghoul’s attempt to knock him off succeeds because of the zaps Tiffany Smoker and Bet have trained on the other two. He has the kid lying facedown now, opting to set his right arm on his neck.

“It’s not loaded,” he says desperately.

“Then what are you doing waving it around?”

“Mugged the fuck out of us this time yesterday. Figured if they came back, y’know. Better late than never.”

“Props for doing it the hard way the first time.” He can’t hide that he’s impressed. “Not us, though.”

Now that he can waste time on what they look like, the set is mottled with yellow-green bruises. The shortest of the three carries a stony expression, hands hanging at his sides with thumbs drumming against his legs. All of them are skin and bones, and barely that.

Bet’s already nodding that they can hang onto them for a night.

They’re quiet for the first half of the walk back. In the last stretch, though, the smaller two start getting twitchy and the hushed kind of foulmouthed every couple of minutes up to the point Tiffany Smoker turns around. “Look, triple threat, we haven’t even seen any shrugs. No muggers either. There are more than four of us with just you three and myself. Anyone who tries to reroute us the Costa Rica way is a complete fucking slicker. Ride it out; we aren’t far.”

They’re less jumpy, but still too jumpy by the time Ghoul is leading them downward on a path that gets even Bet—who’s been in the tunnels with Ghoul for over a year and a half—flipped around.


End file.
